Context matters--but it's complicated

For my 6oth birthday, a friend and I travelled to Oxford, Mississippi to visit William Faulkner’s old stomping grounds. If we’d had more time, we would have continued to Milledgeville, in Georgia, to see Flannery O’Connor’s place. These are trips I’ve been talking about for years, because I love both of these authors’ work. I started reading Faulkner 40 years ago, and there are books, and passages, that are still stuck in my brain.  I find O’Connor’s characters and her sense of place quirky and weird, funny and outrageous.  Finally ticking Rowan Oak off of my literary bucket list was something I looked forward to.

But, as I prepared for the trip, I realized that I wasn’t really crowing about it the way I usually do when I’m getting ready for a much-anticipated journey. I found myself almost ashamed that my bucket list included these white Southern writers, who among others, have been deemed problematic, sometimes for the content of their work, sometimes for things they said, or ways they behaved—all seemingly legitimate reasons to judge them ---at least from the distance of time and hard-earned cultural change.  There is, I suppose, plenty to take away from these authors’ work about the South that can lead to labeling them as racists, or at least as white authors practicing the privilege of being white at a time and in a place that encouraged racism.  I mean, that’s just historical fact, right? Both certainly included racist language in their fictions.  O’Connor, at least at one time, publicly agreed with segregation. For all I know, she was a raging racist.  Faulkner could just as well have held these same prejudices; while in Oxford, we were told a story about how he paid for the education of a young black man, and made sure his family was supported while the man was getting this education.  The implication, from the way this story was told, was that Faulkner so appreciated how hard this young man worked that he wanted to reward him with an education. This is one of those tales that, on the surface, makes Faulkner seem quite the wonderful guy.  But, it’s also a bit (more than a bit?) about a white man deciding that one black man was worth his patronage because he was  “hard working.”  I cannot know what Faulkner was really thinking when he helped the young man get an education that must have been a benefit (or maybe I just hope that is true), nor can any of us know if O’Connor, had she lived to an older, perhaps more enlightened age, if she’d have changed her stance on segregation.  We can’t know these things for sure; but we can judge and, dare I use the term, “cancel” their work just the same.

            This piece isn’t about defending or condemning the folks who find authors (or artists) from the past, through the lens of time, problematic. Pablo Picasso was a misogynist, as were many of the male artists of the time; Paul Gauguin deserted his family and left them in poverty so he could run off to Polynesia, where he helped spread syphilis to the women of those islands.  We know writers and artists who supported Hitler, who actively worked to keep women and people of color from publishing or showing their art. Problematic people and art have always existed, but my point in this essay is to point out that they didn’t/don’t exist in a vacuum. Problematic contexts surround these people, and their art.  And, we each bring our own context to what we read and look at, and how we look and read.

            Still, you might see why I wasn’t exactly shouting about my trip to Mississippi.  I didn’t want to hear how I shouldn’t be promoting racist southern writing. Don’t I know that those old white authors have been cancelled, that we shouldn’t be reading their work, or if we do, we’re supporting all kinds of horrible things? The same woman who told us the story of Faulkner’s largesse had already asked why we were visiting Oxford, and when I said we were ticking the visit to Rowan Oak off of my bucket list, her nose wrinkled a bit and she said something like, “You know, there are other writers from down here.”  Now, maybe she’s just not a fan of Faulkner’s work, and fair enough; he’s not to everyone’s taste; but because of the atmosphere these days, it felt like a rebuke to me, that I had no right holding Faulkner up as someone to admire.

            I am old enough that as a child I read few authors of color, or even women who weren’t writing for children. Because I grew up in Wyoming, a state that to this day is predominantly white, I had no idea that there were people of other colors, or ethnicities, or religions for that matter, until I was in my teens. That was my cultural context: White, rural, isolated from much of the outside world (this was very much pre-cable TV and Internet, remember).  In high school, my favorite English teacher made me feel quite worldly, very literate: I read Steinbeck, Cather, Shakespeare, Asimov, Bradbury, Dickens, Twain—all wonderful reading but also all white and Euro-centric and very mainstream, very…acceptable. For fun, I read Stephen King and HP Lovecraft (I know, I know…I mean I know now, but I certainly only knew that he could scare the pants off of me then), Agatha Christie and PD James.  At least some women were entering the mix, but still…very pale in complexion. But, here’s the thing, and it’s also part of my context: I read as if reading could save me…and it did. When I read, I wasn’t in little old Wyoming where I was a smart fat girl who felt very out of place, who did not join in or care much about what most everyone else seemed to want to do or care about.  I wanted stories.  I wanted other worlds and people.  I wanted out, and reading gave me that.  Before I’m accused of getting off track, let me try to bring this back around to my point about context, or at least closer to it. I need to go down one more side-track to get us there, I think.

            In college, as a Marine Biology major (that’s another story entirely, one which I blame on watching Jacques Cousteau every Sunday night on the one channel we got on our TV), I needed a class in the Humanities, for the Winterim term—a one month-long single course we took between Fall and Spring semesters at my funny little (overly expensive) private college in the PNW.  I don’t remember why I enrolled in the Faulkner class. I am fairly sure that I’d never read one word of his work before. I suppose my advisor, generally bored with his undergraduate advisees, told me it would be a great class for some who “reads so much.” Who knows. But there I was, a nerdy science major in the bookstore, buying a stack of Faulkner paperbacks (I still have them some 40 years later, held together with crumbling rubber bands).  We started with Intruder in the Dust, and worked our way through, with the patient help of the professor, As I Lay Dying, The Sound and The Fury and finally Absalom! Absalom! I admit that I cannot remember how I felt about this work as we began, but I loved reading, and this was an excuse to just read, and then, glory be, talk about what I’d read!  It was sure better than dissecting fetal pigs and sea urchins.  I do know that by the time we got to As I Lay Dying (‘My mother is a fish’—if you’ve read it, you know), I was hooked. I’d found stories inhabited by characters unique to the place in which they lived, but at the same time familiar to me, the reader.  Faulkner’s language was at times impenetrable to my inexperienced brain, but always surprising and multilayered. The characters seemed foreign to me, a westerner who knew almost nothing about the South, and also weirdly familiar (the rural eccentric is alive and well in the Wyoming ranching communities, let me assure you!).  I had a professor who knew how to guide a roomful of novice readers through the Faulknerian labyrinth, with the Greek tragedies and Bible stories in the background, the landscape of his fictional Mississippi county always in the foreground, and names like Wall Street Panic Snopes to amuse this young reader.  Did I understand that his depictions of black people might be seen as racist, as hurtfully stereotyped? Probably I didn’t—I hadn’t been out in the world enough, or met enough people, or read enough, or lived enough life, to put Faulkner’s South into any real context. I could only experience it as it came to me. These were stories about a people and place that was in flux, people who struggled to find themselves in a world that no was no longer theirs. I was too young to know how to question whether or not Faulkner was arguing that this change was good or bad.  I was just there to take it in, to let the characters show it to me.  As an older, more sophisticated (I hope) reader and thinker, I started to understand how art works, how true artists open a door and invite us in, to see what is ugly, and beautiful, right and wrong, all of the complicated contradictions and oppositions that comprise our individual and communal contexts. With his wacky, often over-the-top characters and situations, Faulkner painted the picture for us, showing us what the transition from Old to New South looked like, warts and all.  He showed us how it looks when folks who’ve historically had privilege find themselves competing with one another for a living; when a system that has been familiar and protective, at least for those privileged few, is crumbling, or has crumbled.  Did he use the language of the time, and of the South, to paint this picture? Yep. Were many of his black (and female) characters clichés? Yep.  Were those the brushstrokes and paint colors that depicted that time and place? I think so; at least it did for me.

            I know that this seems like I’m mostly writing a defense of William Faulkner. I suppose it is, a bit; but what I’m really trying to get across here is that for me, what his work did was provide more context for the world.  It opened a window that I could look through and see how things were in other places, at another time—so that I could also see how many of those things were still happening, and not just in Mississippi, but in Wyoming, and Washington, and, as I was starting to figure out, just about everywhere.  Reading books in which the N word was used, or in which black men and women were treated like children, or where women in general came across as a bit silly, or often just plain nuts, did NOT make me think that was the right way to view any of that.  Reading Faulkner made me want to read even more, and yes, at first it led me to reading more white authors. Flannery O’Connor, for example, because that was sort of you did once you’d read a lot of Faulkner; you started on O’Connor. And then Eudora Welty. Then it was Zora Neale Hurston and Ernest Gaines, and Toni Morrison, Louise Erdrich and James Welch, and Sherman Alexie.  And then Octavia Butler and NK Jemison.  The Ands continue.  Faulkner (and to be fair, that professor whose name I can no longer remember) opened a door for a white kid from Wyoming, not to go on reading more white authors, but to read more GOOD authors, and to ask questions of those good authors when I wasn’t sure I agreed with their depictions of people or places, or times and situations.  Faulkner lead me to authors whose work meant something, whose craft and artistry made my world bigger and more inclusive.

            So, my point.  Finally.  I’ve been thinking a lot about this moment we find ourselves in, and the words that are kicked about regarding “wokeness” and “cancel culture.”   I hear my students telling me they “can’t” read O’Connor or Twain, or any author who uses language or writes about themes they (the students) have deemed problematic in some way (or triggering, or offensive, or whatever the word is they use).  And I get it, at least sometimes.  We are in a moment in time when we want to believe that we won’t put up with intolerance or discrimination in our writing, our arts, our TV or films.  We want to believe that this is how we will eliminate it in our everyday lives, I guess.  But.  And here is where things get complicated; but, if we erase something, or refuse to look at it, because it’s problematic, we are ignoring its context. And context matters. When I was a kid in the 70s, the TV show All in The Family was very popular.  It would not be aired today, I don’t think. Archie Bunker was a bigot, a racist, and was definitely not a supporter of women’s rights. He was downright offensive.  But the context is that, at that time, the ideas he espoused were reflected throughout much of America, and by airing this show, we saw how stupid and ridiculous those ideas were (are).  If all you do is look at one facet of something, you can find it easy to judge; if you acknowledge the complexities, the context, you might find that more is happening, and it might be worth it to look again.  Paying attention to the context in which a novel was written, or a painting painted, and as importantly, to our own context (our biases, religion, political, geographical, whatever), matters. If we decide that works of literature or art shouldn’t be read or viewed, without questioning their context, then several things happen, not the least is that we lose access to a lot of really lovely writing and art.  But just as disastrous, I believe, is that we lose history, which means we lose access to our mistakes (and our successes).  Context doesn’t excuse; it helps explain, and it helps us think more critically as we judge what is relevant and what is not.  There. That’s all.